Numerous food products are made by producing shapes from a food mix. Cookie cutters are typical, for cutting uncooked cookie mix. Such machines are used in large bakeries and the cooked products are packaged and shipped to stores and consumed weeks after they are made. However when making products from ground meats, particularly hamburger patties, customer preferences usually dictate that such patties should be made from fresh produce, and shall be prepared and ready to cook, and if possible should be cooked as soon as the patty is shaped. There are of course a large number of examples of frozen patties but these are generally considered to have less customer appeal. Such fresh meat patties may typically be produced by a small neighbourhood local butcher. They may also be required to be produced for cooking at some particular event or institution. In many cases when cooking at home, such patties are shaped by hand, but this is not suitable for use even on a small scale production. In addition, it is difficult to regulate the size of the individual patties, so that the product is uniform in size and shape.
Another factor which has become desirable, is that there are some meat patties which are a conventional size, typically for example, one quarter of a pound. On the other hand, there are much small meat patties known as “sliders” which are much smaller. Producing such sliders even on a relatively small scale, in reasonable numbers is time consuming and labour intensive. In addition, since the normal selling price of such sliders will be much less that the price of a conventional meat patty, it will be appreciated that there is little margin available to cover manual labour costs. It is therefore desirable to provide a food product press which is capable of producing both larger food products and smaller food products in the same press with minor modifications. It is desirable to provide a press at a reasonable cost so that it may be kept, for example, by a local butcher or local restaurant or institution as a piece of kitchen equipment, available for use when required.